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Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Moody on the seeing heaven and hell

Very often religious experiences are dismissed because people who have them bring expectations based on what they believed to begin with. So, Catholics see the Virgin Mary, Protestants see Jesus, Hindus see Krishna, etc. However, Raymond Moody suggests that NDEs have many elements that seem independent from the religious beliefs of those who have them.

“I have not heard a single reference to a heaven or a hell anything like the customary picture to which we are exposed in this society. Indeed, many persons have stressed how unlike their experiences were to what they had been led to expect in the course of their religious training.” Raymond Moody, Life After Life, New York: Bantam, 1976), p. 140.

2 comments:

1) It's true that most people who have an NDE do not see or meet any religious figures, which is rare.

2) Also, most people revived after their heart stops do not have any memory of having an NDE.

3) But it's also true that people in OUR culture who DO have an NDE about Jesus, heaven and/or hell, also trumpet their stories to the skies, or haven others all worked up about trumpeting them for them.

So the media, both Christian and nominally Christian, tend to exagerrate the hits and ignore the vastly more numerous misses.

Even among the rare NDE's that are recalled and loving and well, spiritual, few of those folks are "Evangelical Christians," even though they may wind up more loving and lack fear of death afterewards.

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About Me

I am the author of C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, published by Inter-Varsity Press. I received a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989.